"This was my mental picture for Child Explorer.Alice Liddell goes down the rabbit hole and ends up on Planet Algol (pictured after one day).
Drawn under the influence of the song "Spoilt Victorian Child" by the Fall."
- Lester/B. Portly
Despite the influence of Narnia, Oz and Wonderland upon the fantasy genre, the fantasy cliche of "precocious children in a magical world" seems severely under explored in RPGs.
The "young adult adventure fiction" I read in my youth was full of child detectives, child scientists, and ordinary children thrust into situations of adventure as well as multiple fantasy series' that dealt with ordinary children who stumble into the magic world, plus let us not forget "Harry Potter." Despite this, these established genres of fiction seems to be taboo in the RPG world.
I imagine one reason for the lack of child adventurers in fantasy gaming is an issue of "taste." Children killing sentient beings with swords or children being hacked to death with swords could strike many folks as being distasteful, which is understandable. When children go on adventures in fiction they often benefit from "plot immunity," something which is lacking in many RPGs (unless the referee is a "softball pitcher" and "dice fudger," which would be genre appropriate in this case), and it seems systems that give players some degree of "narrative control" would be appropriate for such a game.
There is the game "Little Fears," which is a horror game dealing with children and boogeymen, and apparently some people did find the first edition uncomfortable as it also dealt with the "real life horrors" that far too many children face. Although I'm unfamiliar with the Little Fears system, perhaps it's ruleset would be appropriate for emulating the "child adventurer" genre?
Many genre properties do have "child adventurer" characters, everything from contemporary epic high fantasy ("A Song of Fire and Ice" for one) to the sidekicks of Batman, Indiana Jones and the Road Warrior. I have also seen an AD&D adventure in an old issue of Dragon magazine that deals with a troop of Boy Scouts exploring a haunted house!
Although I would let a player utilize the "child adventurer" archetype in my own Planet Algol campaign, I do have misgivings about a fictional child being put into the fictional perilous situations of my campaign, which I guess shows how this can be an emotional and/or controversial subject for many.
